Datacom delivers solid profit, driven by one-off
Datacom Group this morning reported a NZ$64.7 million profit before tax, up 27% from last year’s NZ$50.9 million, aided by the one-off sale of its Asian contact centre business.
Datacom booked a NZ$17 million profit from that divestment. Company chairman Craig Boyce described the results as “an excellent performance”.
Overall revenue was up by 1.3% from NZ$870 million to NZ$881 million. While that appears historically flat, it was affected by the sale of the call centre business last April.
Staff numbers were up 6% overall, excluding the impact of the Asian sale. At year end staff numbers totalled 3,756 with 2,371 in New Zealand, 1,245 in Australia and 140 in Asia.
Datacom also announced the appointment of Theresa Eyssens as CEO of Datacom Systems Australia. Eyssens previously worked for IBM leading its ANZ resources team.
Australian revenue was soft, in line with the economy there, and a decline in the manufacturing and resources sectors. Despite that, CEO Jonathan Ladd said business in both the state and local government sectors in Australia and Datacom’s third-party hardware resale business grew during the year.
New Zealand sales rose by 12% to NZ$466 million for the year. The company also acquired New Zealand local government software business Origen in March.
The group has invested NZ$170 million in datacentre capacity in the past few years, CEO Jonathan Ladd said. These now total 12 across Australia and New Zealand, five of which are provided through partners.
In the last year, NZ$40.8 million of capital was invested, most of that in the Hamilton Kapua datacentre extension, the new Auckland Orbit datacentres, both in New Zealand and a facility in Perth.
Ladd says that investment is to support virtual private cloud demand and demand for as-a-service delivery.
The Datacom operations in Kuala Lumpur and Manila traded profitably and are focused on expansion, Ladd said.